You won't fix incompetence by yelling at it, you will simply hide it from plain view. If the Sgt Major routine actually worked for engineering projects then why do we have inspectors/testers? - Why not just hurl insults at the engineers until they get it right first time, every time?

Theory: A OTP has a finite length in bits, a finite number of bits means a finite number of possible combinations, anything with a finite number of combinations is crackable by brute force in finite time (assuming time is infinite).

Practice: Make the number of combinations large enough so that the time to crack it makes cracking it impractical, eg: 100 trillion years.

TapeCutter writes: Gavin Schmidt from realclimate has published an excellent opinion piece on the narrative of the scientific heretic and it's appeal to journalists and the general public.

Quoth TFA — "This idea of knowledge sitting on a knife edge ready to flip whenever some new observation or insight arrives, is the reason why science is so exciting and fascinating. That is the reason why science deserves to be the story, and why journalists should be continuously searching for the 'front page' thought that will allow this story to be told to a wide audience. But all too often the real story is neglected in favour of a familiar well-worn, but inappropriate, trope."